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Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

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41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#41
post #7

The American Medical Association and health insurance industries can all fuck off. The healthcare situation in the US is so absurd and Kafka-esque I welcome LLMs in medicine. I haven’t seen a MD in years, I’ve only seen nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Add to that how insurance will randomly deny tests, procedures and treatments, I have very little use for the current medical establishment.

NYS is trying to make it illegal for LLMs to give medical, legal or engineering advice. Because of course its a state built upon exploitation so.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S7263/amendm...

The engineering aspect is quite hilarious. I have a PE license, but don't use it. But the PE definition in NY is wide open. Technically, if you do the right work, even writing software can fall under a PE license, though its incredibly rare. So this could theoretically ban LLM Code assistants.

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#42
post #8

I think doctors are going to lose their minds or at the very least get extremely agitated/frustrated as patients increasingly use AI tools to do self-research for symptoms and diagnosis. And I know this because I am guilty of this myself and recently had a dentist tell me to not do that. And this applies to so many health workers, your GP as well as your physical therapist, etc. Recently I had Claude analyze an MRI o…

I like it when patients research things. Consult is more engaging for me when people care about and try to understand stuff. It's hard for patients to interpret medical research and evidence though... ChatGPT recommended treatment for some of my family members based on studies with 60 patients. It wasn't exactly established medical practice.

There is a fine line between being a well-informed and engaged patient and the whole “dO yOuR oWn ReSeArCh” madness. A lot of people don’t know where that line is and when they’ve crossed over it.

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#43
post #8

I think doctors are going to lose their minds or at the very least get extremely agitated/frustrated as patients increasingly use AI tools to do self-research for symptoms and diagnosis. And I know this because I am guilty of this myself and recently had a dentist tell me to not do that. And this applies to so many health workers, your GP as well as your physical therapist, etc. Recently I had Claude analyze an MRI o…

Radiology is probably an edge case, due to needing the right inductive bias and training data that general purpose multimodal language models may lack. At least until someone creates RadiologyBench and provides an incentive to the labs to make that part of their data pipeline. I have witnessed a non-radiology case (a STD on the face) where the LLM got it right and the doctor didn't (he said it was diabetes related).…

Yes. The issue is the the average user doesn't understand that the vision capabilities of LLMs are limited.

It's a world of difference to upload the radiologist/pathologist report and go from there than uploading the raw images.

The first is a great idea, the second reckless and dangerous.

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#44
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We'll see!" -USA

"Coverage is denied for the cost of your visit to the doctor and prescribed treatment because you didn't go through our triage concierge chat bot first."

Stop giving them ideas!!

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#45

Specific tools for MDs to record patient notes were found to hallucinate patient details in 45% of cases. They were especially bad on patient mental health. I am against AI in healthcare in most cases, but anything other than augmentation is probably never going to be happening. https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/specialreports/specialr...

That study cites that 45% of vendors had hallucinations, likely vendors using smaller or cheaper models. So 55% of vendors had no known hallucinations.

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HIPAA only applies to data originating from a covered entity. It doesn't apply to information the patient supplies directly. As a patient, I can take out a street sign displaying my health records if I want. It's my data. If I want to upload it to a strange AI or any other app, that's completely fine. HIPAA isn't involved, for either me or the company I upload to. In fact, quite the opposite. CMS has been going to gr…

It’s a pretty fine line, and if they want to do anything beyond just telling you things about your data, actually taking any sort of actions or communications with health care providers, they should qualify as a business associate under HIPAA. And I certainly am never going to share my healthcare data with an AI company without any sort of regulations or oversight, beyond a TOS.

A Business Associate (BA) under HIPAA is a entity that contracts with a Covered Entity (CE) using a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). OpenAI wouldn't be considered a BA unless they had an executed BAA with a CE.

There are a wide variety of things, including communication with providers, that OpenAI can do without being regulated by HIPAA. The provider, however would most likely be covered, so they would be under an obligation to not disclose any PHI.

As an example, consider a hypothetical "email my doc" app. This app could take health information from the patient and email it to all of their doctors without falling under HIPAA at all.

What you're probably thinking of is the HIPAA Privacy Rule (there's more to HIPAA than just that, the Security Rule is pretty involved). Under the Privacy Rule, CEs and BAs can not disclose PHI without a patient's consent, with a few exceptions.

If the patient is disclosing that information though, all bets are off (aside from state level regulations).

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#47
post #28

Americans will do everything but not have socialised health care even though they are already leading the world on taxes spent per capita for health care. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea... Also, what is HIPPA?

It’s a patient privacy law that applies to hippos.

It's an acronym in which neither 'P' stands for 'privacy'

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#49
post #8

I think doctors are going to lose their minds or at the very least get extremely agitated/frustrated as patients increasingly use AI tools to do self-research for symptoms and diagnosis. And I know this because I am guilty of this myself and recently had a dentist tell me to not do that. And this applies to so many health workers, your GP as well as your physical therapist, etc. Recently I had Claude analyze an MRI o…

I don’t have the reference on my fingertips, but patients who are involved in their own healthcare have better outcomes. Moreover, for those of us (and there are many of us) who have gotten increasingly frustrated with US healthcare (e.g., long waits, short visits where you never really get a chance to discuss the health issue, difficulty getting appropriate tests), AI is looking like an increasingly attractive option. Not as a replacement for physicians, but at least as a path forward to possibly better understand what is going on.

Re: Launching Health in ChatGPT to US Users

#50
post #8

I think doctors are going to lose their minds or at the very least get extremely agitated/frustrated as patients increasingly use AI tools to do self-research for symptoms and diagnosis. And I know this because I am guilty of this myself and recently had a dentist tell me to not do that. And this applies to so many health workers, your GP as well as your physical therapist, etc. Recently I had Claude analyze an MRI o…

I know of someone who had a red bump on their arm and asked ChatGPT if that was a problem and if they should see a doctor. It said no so they left it. Turns out it was a tick and they now have lyme disease.

I feel like I'm reading comments on LLMs writing code where they romanticize that programmers were perfect before LLMs.

Doctors are not infallible. I know plenty of them and they absolutely tell me who and who not to go to. The old joke, what do you call the person who graduated last in their class at med school? Doctor.

Lyme disease in particular has all sorts of issues with diagnosis - from real doctors!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10778834/

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